On December 30, the Ministry of Education conferred the 2025 Outstanding Scientific Research Achievement Awards (Natural Sciences and Engineering Technology). The project "Key Technologies, Equipment, and Applications for Power IoT Sensing, Storage, Computing, and Control of Large-Scale Urban Virtual Power Plants," led by Professor Tai Nengling from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and with Shanghai KeLiang Information Technology Co., Ltd. as a major participating unit, won the First Prize.

This project addresses the major challenges of urban virtual power plants (VPPs), including insufficient flexibility resource perception, weak aggregation and computation capabilities, and imprecise regulation. It develops power IoT equipment integrating sensing, storage, computing, and control to achieve fast, accurate, and efficient regulation of large-scale urban VPPs. The project team, after more than a decade of research, overcame three major challenges: the integration of sensing, storage, and computing for flexibility resources; energy routing enhancement; and intelligent regulation. They developed a sensing-storage-computing integrated terminal, an edge-enhanced energy router, and an intelligent regulation cloud platform, breaking through technical bottlenecks in power IoT sensing, storage, computing, and control, improving the efficient regulation capability of city-level VPPs, and enabling fast and accurate peak and frequency regulation of massive flexibility resources in large-scale urban VPPs. The project outcomes have been widely applied in East China, setting a new record for the largest peak-shaving scale in the East China Power Grid; they have been extended to more than 20 provinces and cities, and exported to multiple countries. The achievements have created a series of user-side intelligent equipment and smart operation platforms, accelerating the formation of new productive forces on the load side and contributing to the green and low-carbon transformation of the energy sector.

KeLiang has long leveraged its technical expertise in simulation and testing to closely align with the national "New Type Power System" strategy, providing robust testing and verification for key equipment and regulation strategies. By establishing a closed loop of "R&D – verification – application," the company helps optimize equipment performance and improve system reliability, effectively supporting the realization of "digital transformation" and "green and low-carbon" goals in the energy sector. In the future, KeLiang will continue to increase investments in research and education, deepen cooperation mechanisms with universities and research institutes, jointly promote key technology innovation and outcome commercialization, build a closer and more efficient industry-university-research collaborative ecosystem, and provide solid support for national energy strategy implementation and industrial upgrading.